10,000 Core Supercomputer Created in Amazon Cloud

Cycle Computing specializes in helping clients get access to heavy computing power in a short amount of time. It has used the Amazon Cloud several times in the past to gain access to several thousand cores. CEO Jason Stowe had gotten the idea to take that number up to a nice round 10,000. There was just one problem, there was no one that needed that kind of power just yet. When Jacob Corn of biotech firm Genentech came calling, Cycle got to work. The end result was the combination of 1,250 eight core systems, 8.75TB of RAM, and 2PB of hard drive space. Using this cluster, the calculations dealing with protein binding were completed in eight hours. The $8,500 price tag was far less than it would have cost Genentech to build its own cluster. The time frame was also much less than the current resources of Genentech could provide. Cycle is already looking forward to bigger systems, and Genentech is open to using Amazon in the future.